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88007858Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students Better Evaluate Scientific Claimshttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2017/12/21/critical-thinking-skills-to-help-students-better-evaluate-scientific-claims/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2017/12/21/critical-thinking-skills-to-help-students-better-evaluate-scientific-claims/#commentsThu, 21 Dec 2017 18:37:17 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=49144Michelle Joyce doesn’t shy away from politicized science topics such as climate change. In fact, she works to equip seniors at Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida with the skills to accurately evaluate those topics on their own. Along with teaching chemistry and physics, she offers a class called “thinking skills” where students solve logic and math puzzles while also enhancing their media literacy. Students go beyond just learning about legitimate sources of information on the internet and delve into just how the information is put together in the first place.

But teaching students those critical thinking skills only as they’re about to depart for college can be too little too late.

“It’s a really hard thing to teach within the space of everything else that you need to teach in a classroom,” Joyce said. “It’s crucial that we teach it as early as we can.”

The internet has no shortage of dubious information; and the ability to evaluate health and science claims is a subset of media literacy. With the abundance of health/science content students may only see via social media, kids are ill-equipped to discern hype from real science.

In one recent study by the Stanford History Education Group, 170 high school students were shown a photo of flowers growing fused together and asked if that provided strong evidence on the conditions outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Students with mastery of media literacy would argue this was not sufficient evidence because there is no information on the source of the photo or where the flowers were photographed. However, less than 20 percent of the students responding made that argument. Nearly 40 percent argued that the picture alone was strong evidence for conditions outside the nuclear plant.

“We are swimming in bullsh-t and lots of different claims about what helps or harms us,” said Dr. Andrew Oxman, director of research at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. “Everybody needs to figure out which claims are trustworthy.”

START EARLY

Many of these critical thinking concepts are not difficult but need to become habits adopted early in life, which is why Oxman first tried them out in his children’s elementary school classrooms. One way to teach how science is made is to let the children experience and figure it out for themselves.

Oxman gave students a bag of M&Ms and told them that some kids thought the red ones helped them study better but others got stomach aches. He instructed students to evaluate these claims.

“They figured out very quickly, you have to compare like to like,” said Oxman.

The most revealing aspect of this lesson was how quickly students understood the pitfalls of setting up a randomized study. The teacher mentioned they could set random assignments much like they do in gym class where they set up teams by alternating students in line.

“The kids started laughing because they understood right away that doesn’t work,” said Oxman. Students learned they can sabotage randomization in picking teams by setting up a line so they are one student away from their friend.

“In research jargon, we referred to that as ‘concealed allocation’ and it’s a concept that takes time to explain to health professionals but the kids understood it right away intuitively.”

Through this experiment students quickly figured out they had to measure things exactly same. They discovered the flaws of using small samples and being misled by games of chance, he added.

Oxman has since taken this idea of teaching young children concepts of evaluating science to a much larger scale.

Teaching Health Claims

He and a global team of researchers at Informed Health Choices developed a study of some 10,000 Ugandan fifth-graders to see if a simple comic book on evaluating health claims could provide students with the skills to make better choices about their health. The comic book begins by describing how one child — who has burned his finger — sticks his wound into dung to heal it. The finger gets infected and he visits Professors “Fair” and “Compare” and begins to learn about how to question and evaluate the health advice he receives.

The comic above was used as part of a study in Uganda to teach students how to evaluate health and science claims. Courtesy of Informed Health Choices. (Courtesy of Informed Health Choices)

The workbook had a convincing effect, Oxman said. The students who received the workbook and those who did not receive it were then tested on how to evaluate health claims. Fifty percent more children in the workbook group had a passing score on that critical thinking test. Twenty percent of the students receiving the workbook even showed mastery of the concepts.

As a follow-up to the study, researchers are asking children and adults what they learned and how they’ve used it. Responses so far have been very promising, he added.

One girl talked about going shopping with her mom, who picked up an expensive new brand of toothpaste, but the girl picked up an older brand of toothpaste and found the ingredients were the same. During the pilot studies, Oxman said it was fun to see kids walking out of class talking to each other about claims. Recognizing a claim, and being able to determine if it’s trustworthy is the critical first step to appraising all the claims people hear every day, he said.

EVALUATING CLAIMS

Palmetto Ridge High School science teacher Michelle Joyce said she uses a process called “claim, evidence and response.”

First students recognize a claim or a hypothesis. Next, they look at evidence: the original data; who calculated the data; where the study was conducted; if the researcher would be inclined to benefit from a certain result; if researchers did multiple trials or tested on many people and more. Finally, students must come up with a response: a determination of the validity of the claim.

Joyce uses resources from a variety of places including Common Sense Education*, a nonprofit that provides free curriculum in media literacy for grades K-12.

When teachers tackle the subject of media literacy they may think about social media etiquette or cyberbullying — that’s a component of media literacy called digital citizenship. But teaching media literacy can also go into specific domains such as health and science. To understand the science news they see online, kids need to understand basic concepts like sample sizes or what “peer review” means, said Jeffrey Knutson of Common Sense Education. Through this curriculum, students learn how information is created and distributed.

“It gives them an insider’s view of how information we get is created and how we receive it,” said Knutson.

Digital citizenship and media literacy is often taught as something extra and not necessarily embedded in curriculum, said Knutson. However, health or science claims seen online can be easily incorporated into science or health class.

One example Knutson provided was a recent New York Timesarticle about health hazards of chemicals used in packaging such as boxed macaroni and cheese. The article stirred up some controversy because it didn’t offer specifics on what dose of these chemicals can do damage. The study was financed by an environmental advocacy group, not an unbiased source. The Times reported on this study and other journalists reported on it and then reports about the reporting came out, noted Knutson.

“The best thing teachers can do is to use these examples in their class with their students,” according to Knutson. “It’s important to model how you would go about reading an article like that.”

BREAKING DOWN THE FACTS

High school science teacher Michelle Joyce says that if teachers start in elementary school, and build on these concepts in middle and high school, “we have significantly more chance over a period of time to build this common sense, this media literacy,” said Joyce.

“If I’m only seeing them in 11th and 12th grade, many of their opinions are already formed,” she added.

When Joyce really breaks a scientific topic into its component parts, she can sometimes convince skeptical students.

For instance, students were learning the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, which stems from water temperature and salt-level or salinity increases. They researched where the increased salinity or temperature could be coming from, including climate change and waste dumped near the ocean.

One student said, “I can’t believe one degree in temperature makes this much a difference for these animals,” recalled Joyce.

Instead of rehashing the reef data, Joyce brought the conversation back to a different perspective and explained pH levels in the human body. Even a slight change in pH could shut down a person’s bodily functions. Suddenly the minor change to water temperature and salinity, which affects pH, didn’t seem so minor.

“I have to bring it back to something they can relate to,” said Joyce.

Joyce can’t go into such detail with every science lesson but she hopes by equipping students with the skills to question what they read, they’ll be able to pursue these questions on their own.

“Teaching them those skills on how to think like a scientist and how to analyze information that they’re receiving is just as important as teaching them to use the periodic table, for example.”

The new NGSS standards represent the core scientific concepts that practicing scientists agree K-12 students should know by the time they graduate. The framework for the standards was developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve. Together they built compiled principals and solicited input from states about what pedagogy and curricular specifics to build in.

“Students need to understand how science works, the practices and the crosscutting concepts in order to be ready to assume their roles in a scientifically complex world,” said Frank Neipold, co-chair of the Climate Education Interagency Working Group at the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Neipold has worked on the standards in many capacities and sees them as vitally important to educating the next generation to think critically about how systems work together.

Twenty-six states helped write the standards, and while there is no obligation that states adopt them, many likely will. The standards focus on fewer core concepts, are meant to go deeper within each concept, and emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of science.

The standards are organized in three dimensions: key concepts, crosscutting concepts, and practices. Key concepts are broadly important and teachable over a series of years, such as the subject of climate change, which can get more complex as students build upon their knowledge. The second dimension is crosscutting concepts, things that span the scientific disciplines like energy and matter, cause and effect or systems. Lastly, students will be expected to understand the practice of science, undertaking scientific inquiry and comparing the practices of science with those of engineers.

While the NGSS are not part of the Common Core State Standards — those were developed under the auspices of federal government and focus only on math and literacy — there are some similarities. Proponents of both sets of standards say they’re meant to emphasize close reading of non-fiction tests, performance-based standards, and an integrated approach to learning across disciplines.

CLIMATE CHANGE INCLUDED

One of the more controversial aspects of the new science standards is the inclusion of climate change in the curriculum. “There was never a debate about whether climate change would be in there,” Heidi Schweingruber of the National Research Council told National Public Radio. “It is a fundamental part of science, and so that’s what our work is based on, the scientific consensus.”

Still, science teachers often find themselves pulled in to help bolster math and reading scores, leaving them with little time to teach science, let alone incorporate complicated new topics. Teaching climate change science can feel daunting to many teachers who don’t have a firm grasp of all the information, he said.

“We have not trained our teachers very well to work across disciplines,” Boesch said. Teaching climate change inherently requires integration of things like earth sciences, chemistry and systems. A changing climate will affect all parts of life. Teachers aren’t always comfortable teaching all the elements and will need to be trained.

The standards are meant to lead the student through a progression of concepts, providing building blocks early on that can scaffold more complicated concepts in higher grades.

“We as a nation have a real deep and multidimensional problem on our hands that has to involve education of our young people,” said Boesch on the subject of climate change. “We need to equip people to have the skills as well as the knowledge to deal with it.”

The new standards will also require a whole new emphasis on revamping science textbooks. “A lot of materials out there are sub-par,” Neipold said.

“Climate change is not a political issue and it’s not a debate,” said Mario Molina, deputy director for the Alliance for Climate Education. “It’s science, strongly researched and thoroughly vetted science. So our hope is that teachers will not see this as political debate.” He believes students have the right to study climate change as it unfolds, as well as solutions to the problem.